Media and Publics in Dark Times

An OOPS course

The course objective, as I put it in the planned syllabus (responding to an administrative mandate to include such statements): “The objective of this class follows the insights of Michael Oakeshott, the great British (conservative) philosopher, as he illuminated the problem of education and of the liberal arts. He observed that ...
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The Meaning of Michelle

First Black First Lady as Outsider Within and Agent of Change

This post is part of the Bodies, Gender, and Domination OOPS Series. There are many aspects of the United States, of the political culture and system that I find interesting (to use a word that is telling without saying anything much). One of them is the office of the First Lady. There is ...
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25 Alternatives to Penis Envy

A Preliminary List

Penis envy is a catchy term, which is one reason it effectively made its way into popular culture. Coined in Freud’s 1925 Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes, it is widely misunderstood to mean, or used to perpetuate, the idea that those who posses a penis ...
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Warehouse of Identities

A Neoliberal Delusion

Feminism & Capitalism Has second-wave feminism as an epochal social phenomenon unwittingly supplied key ingredients to the new spirit of capitalism named neoliberalism? This is the troubling question Nancy Fraser asks in her lecture Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History.[1] At stake is the possibility that the cultural changes jump-started by ...
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Simianization in the Film “Sing”

Glaring caricature and stereotype provides teachable moment about racial bias

The animated film “Sing,” which opened on December 21, features a lazy, tone-deaf, and hurtful character choice by writer and director Garth Jennings. Whether conscious or unconscious, Jennings’ script perpetuates systemic racism and the history of simianization and oppression of black people by depicting them as gorillas, monkeys, and apes. “Sing” ...
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“Reclaiming Utopia”

An Introduction to the Project of Challenging the Financial Imagination

Dithering between the naiveté of techno-utopias of a fully-automated post capitalism, and the banal indulgence in bureaucratic ‘utopias of rules’, utopian thinking today seems to offer meagre hope for articulating and enacting radical futures. Meanwhile, in the world of financial markets, a formidable imagined future is being methodically produced. Fictional ...
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The Coming Crisis in Healthcare and its Possible Solutions

An Open Letter to Colleagues at the New School and Beyond

The subjects we propose to consider are in the area of health policy, and the instruments are in the domain of federalism, to avoid misunderstanding, “progressive federalism,” meaning normatively attractive forms of experimentation on the level of the states. While we strongly believe that similar initiatives are needed in the ...
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“Post-Truth,” And “Social Research”

Oxford English Dictionary’s word of 2016

What happens when facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief? This phenomenon is known as “post-truth,” a term that was named word of 2016 by the Oxford English Dictionary. When false news is seen as credible and the metrics of prediction have ...
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“Post-Truth,” And “Social Research”

“Great Books Camp” as Political Education

A Reply to Molly Worthen

In “Can I Go to Great Books Camp?” which recently appeared in the New York Times, Molly Worthen provides an historical account of the development of the “Great Books” program and related curricula inside American universities. It is a report about the present deployment of such “canonical” works in various ...
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“Great Books Camp” as Political Education

The Masturbatory Logic of Fake News Sites

This post is part of the Bodies, Gender, and Domination OOPS Series. On December 4th a man walked into a warehouse-sized pizza and Ping-Pong establishment in Washington D.C. armed with a rifle and fired it once. Nobody was harmed, though pizza patrons fled the business and the neighborhood was put on lock-down ...
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The Masturbatory Logic of Fake News Sites